Sulfuric
by Ren in the Storm
Summary: Another corpse, Kudo-kun. In the water. Please get with the program." Detective Conan x Elfen Lied x Magic Kaitou crossover.
1. Chapter 1

**Neither _Detective Conan, Magic Kaitou _nor _Elfen Leid _are not mine, y'foo. You been Disclaim'd!**

**Summary: **When Lucy is shot on her escape, instead of Kamakura, she washes up on Beika's mostly deserted beach. _**ELxDCxMK**_'s** _love_**child.

**On Pairings: (One**_sided_**(?))Lucy/**_Nyuu**x**?_/_Kotah**x**_**Yuka(Onesided(?)) / Shinichi_xRanx_**_Conan_(_Onesided_)**_x__Ai_(Onesided(?))** / **_Kazuhax_Heiji** / (_Onesided_)_Akako**xKaitou**_**(_u_ _Kid)x_Aoko /** _Others to be added_

**Warnings: Mild** to **excessive** violence, language, some nudity. **Slight hints **of ecchi and shoujo. (In the spirit of poking fun at you all xP)

* * *

**Sulphur; **_"...**-**nonmetallic element **occurring widely in nature** in several **free** and combined allotropic forms. **It is used in** black **gunpowder**, rubber vulcanization, **the manufacture of insecticides** **and** **pharmaceuticals**, and in the preparation of sulfur compounds such as..."_

* * *

**The sun burns hot on tanned grains of sand on Beika's beaches on Saturday. **The air is tangy with the sharp, strong smell of salt and the ocean water is thankfully cold, glittering like thousands of broken jewels on the white-frothed surface. The beach is mostly empty and a teenage girl wonders why; it's a beautiful day for spring. She assumes most people are too sleepy in their beds.

"Ran! Ran-chan!" Sonoko cups her hands around her mouth to shout, and when she sees she's caught the girl's attention, she gestures. Shining water is lapping against her narrow hips. Sonoko has short blonde hair, a gold tan and an expensive bikini that advertises her family's (Suzuki) wealth. She motions to the sea around her. "C'mon Ran! Get in!"

Ran Mouri smiles apologetically at her friend. "Sorry, I'm waiting for Conan-kun." She herself is sitting on a smoothened beach towel, knees bent with her milk-white arms clasped around them. Her chin had been on her knees and she'd been thinking of an absent friend with a cocky smile she'd once found annoying. Now she misses it because it'd meant Shinichi was alright, that she was alright, that the world was put back together again and she could stand straight. '_Come home Shinichi', _she thought sadly. He'd been gone almost a year.

Her hand shaded her eyes and she looked around. "Where is that little midget?" Sonoko wondered aloud. The rowdy gang of Conan's friends had been the ones to tug her into the water anyway and where now splashing each other in the surf. But the four-eyed shrimp and that creepy quiet girl were gone and only tiny footprints pressed in the sand showed they had traveled further down the coastline. Sonoko wanted to excuse Ran into the water; not only was Sonoko determined Ran wouldn't get a better than her by sunning herself on the sand but she recognized the look in Ran's soft violet eyes and wanted to cheer one of her only real friends up. This called for drastic measures.

"Raa_-aaaan_," Sonoko complained in her whiniest voice. Sonoko was alot more like how a child should act than Ai-chan was.

Clear violet eyes swept down the beachside and picked out pinpricks of Conan's black hair and the red swimsuit Ai was wearing. _'At least they're still on the beach,' _Ran thought wryly. Last time, they'd wandered off the beach and plopped back into the parked car'ssweaty seats. Ran sighed and smiled at this memory and then got up, stretching. She'd just scorned people who just lay limp on the ground. Here she was, sullen and sitting on her beach towel like a naughty boy on time-out.

"Coming Sonoko!"

_'Just you wait Shinichi Kudo; when you come back, I'll be smiling and strong!'_

Ran dusted the sand grit off her shins and raced to the ocean, wavy brown hair lashing behind her and her heart warmed by the sun.

* * *

Conan sneezed and cupped his nose a second too late. Ai Haibara looked over at him with amusement coloring her hard gray eyes and her hands laced behind her back. "You know what they say Kudo-kun," the girl smirked. "Someone's spreading an unkind rumor about you."

They were padding down the shore with sugary sand sticking between their toes. A good distance away from the others, Ai had started playing "hide-and-seek" with the rest of the Detective Boys to start it and when Conan tracked her, she'd pretty much kidnapped him away "to let him assist" in poking at sea specimens scuttling from the waves. The rest of the Detective Boys, Conan had looked back to note with slight irritation, were now playing around in the surf with Conan and Ai forgotten. _'I hope they don't do that for any criminal investigations,' _"Conan" thought, a little twitch in his eye. He didn't really need their help for these, but they sometimes pointed out odd things that helped him piece the case together faster. He kind of understood kids liked to play but Conan still got annoyed by their silly antics sometimes.

Conan took his glass-less glasses off and rubbed his nose with the back of his other hand. "Isn't that if someone's thinking of you?" he asked, shooting a look back at her that was accompanyed by a faint smile. Ai smirked back in response but it was a little softer around the lines of her lips this time. Showed how far she'd come since she first glided into Conan's endless routine of murders and intense clue-hunting."It all depends on the interpretation Kudo-kun, like many things do in the world. The chances between them seem more in favor of someone smearing the name of the Great Detective of the East, considering how many people have grudges against you for locking them in prison..."

"You never look on the bright side when it considers me, ne Haibara?"

Ai was walking in front of him, straight shoulder-length auburn swinging over her red-strapped shoulders. Even though her face wasn't in his direction, he could actually hear the smile in her calm voice. "I'm just realistic Kudo-kun, and you do have an unhealthy habit of angering unbalanced people." Gin's face, a cruel face with cold green eyes glaring under the rim of a black hat, flashed into mind, but Ai didn't shrink away from it for once. Here, surrounded with the warm sun reflecting on the glassy water, with Kudo-kun as her friend by her side, and precious people close enough behind them... she felt safe and even happy. The thought startled her into a short laugh.

"I also have a habit of putting them away and keeping people safe" was going to be Shinichi's retort, but Ai's laugh stopped him at "I also". He had to smile too. He could understand how she felt because he never thought he could feel so happy and secure while the Black Organization still slunk around the corners of their lives. He thought that until he saw Ran smiling at him with no sadness to cloud her eyes and her slender hand curled around his much-smaller one, and then he knew it wasn't true. At least the "happy" part.

Conan bumped into Ai, who was standing still and gazing out to ocean with her eyes glued to some piece of limp, buoyant seaweed that blazed in the sun's glower. He was concerned instantly. "Haibara, what is it?"

She seemed remarkably calm and paused to take time and sort her thoughts. "I don't want to alarm you, but it looks like your curse struck again, Kudo-kun."

_'Curse...?' _Conan wasn't aware he'd asked aloud until Haibara nodded. Her gray eyes were still stuck to the seaweed. It was only when she pointed that Conan saw the bright seaweed was actually hair and could spot the vague suggestions of limbs floating in the water.

Ai sighed.

"Another _corpse_, Kudo-kun. Please get with the program."

* * *

**Yeah, it's short. Hush you. Just the beginning.**

**Okay** I'll be straight up; I'm only on the ninth episode of _**Elfen Leid **_right now and I can't access any more right now. But I have had it spoiled pretty well, I'm just watching to be ejamikated so I sound like I know what I'm talking about. Don't worry; I won't go theorizing on random things. Well. Yeah. Actually I might O.x

**Author's Corner**

On another note, I have no idea what to pair the characters up with. And to be honest, I really don't care too much. I'm one of those rare fangirls you'll find who likes all the characters regardless of gender, alliance or actions. So no, I won't bash Ran/Kazuha/Ai/Aoko/Akako/random pizza girl, stop asking. So I'll let _you_ guys decide the pairings, 'kay? You lucky dogs you. I really don't mind any pairing.

Haibara feeling warm and tingly inside? I really hope she feels that at least sometime, because she deserves it. Me myself have actually experienced that sensation. I called it "true happiness" and now understand why some people associate feelings with the heart(which I used to think just pumped blood. God figure). I actually felt something very warm and bright in my chest because two old and very precious friends of mine reconciled to me. My other friend thought I was on drugs because I was beaming for no visiable reason and humming.

You'll probably never know **how much **I struggled between this and ELxKH. My reasoning for that was if the Organization was scoping out the lab Lucy was kept at and saw her, wouldn't they become interested why she was there, locked up and experimented on? It was very tempting actually. I'll write a one shot/maybe series on it later; It's kind of festering in my brain...

**Please _rate_; update in _two_-_four_ days.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary: **When Lucy is shot on her escape, instead of Kamakura, she washes up on Beika's mostly deserted beach. _**ELxDCxMK**_'s** _love_**child.

**On Pairings: (One**_sided_**(?))Lucy/**_Nyuu**x**?_/_Kotah**x**_**Yuka(Onesided(?)) / Shinichi_xRanx_**_Conan_(_Onesided_)**_x__Ai_(Onesided(?))** / **_Kazuhax_Heiji** / (_Onesided_)_Akako**xKaitou**_**(_u_ _Kid)x_Aoko /** _Others to be added_

**Warnings: Mild** to **excessive** violence, language, some nudity. **Slight hints **of ecchi and shoujo. (In the spirit of poking fun at you all xP)

* * *

**Hurt, how much it hurt! **She was no stranger to pain, having both dealt and recieved, but God, this was destroying her! Her head was splitting from the hot lead planted through her temple by hateful humans and she couldn't breathe. Wet, salty water swam in her windpipe. She tried to open her mouth to let her dying lungs swell with beautiful clean air but her lips were glued with dried salt and her heart, beating ferociously on bruising ribs, was failing. She could feel its beats, could count them; from fierce and even struggles to a jagged and shallow rhythm. _No, can't die, won't die, can't can't before_

But she was. Seawater clogged her throat with slime and she couldn't crack her mouth open. Her head was peeling apart in red bursts. Her heart, unreliable and jealous, the organ those humans whispered _she didn't have_, was fading.

Her arms dangling useless in the water were brushed by chills on her fingertips.

_Arms...?_

_Blood splattered her dress, soaking warmly to her skin and she likened it to the heat of Kotah's skin and the warmth in his dark blue eyes. Her vecters coiled, floating, and the warm blood ran red threads down their thick, invisible wrists. She looked at the mangled corpse with no pity or regret, only a dull anger and an even duller yearning buried under emotional lockdown... The sensation of thrusting her ghostly extra arms through them, the split second before she ripped them to pieces from the inside out, she would feel a human's warmth and throbbing heart, and compare it to her own constant coldness..._

She was numb to the feeling of small hands wrapping around her strong, slim upper arms. Her limp body was pulled and she lingered in memories or death and imprisonment and torture. The sole bright moments of her life were picked through again and again, tirelessly...

_A boy with dark hair and blue eyes. He has a smile, crooked when he's watching her and it widens when she looks at him watching her. She remembers touching his hand, then the same size as her own, how she tried to be subtle when she hooked her fingers around his. He would keep walking as if he didn't notice. But then the hand will close around hers, her first and only kind feel of another hand, and she'll notice what a perfect fit around hers it is._

_Kotah._

Her back is against gritty sand and the tide laps her feet. She hears birds faintly. Her skin warms from the sun. The hands pump her chest in a rhythm like her faded heart and a voice is swearing over her, swearing and urging her to _keep breathing dammit don't die_. She's too tired to slice the voice with the ghostly hands. They've long since withered back into her spine anyway.

Water pumps from her shriveled lungs to her throat, and she feels the bitter brush of salt as it rushes up her windpipe. Something triggers in her dulling body and suddenly her throat itches, she coughs and coughs and she can't stop. The water is out but the taste keeps rubbing the inside of her soft throat and her coughs rack through her. Hot bile pushes from her empty stomach and pours from her mouth, splatters. The pain had been fading away and now it rips fresh and sharp and hard through her burning chest and throat, her head pounds in beat with her rejuvinated heart. But her dry lips are parted now and they gulp in greedy packets of salt-baked air. It rushes through her. Clean and wonderful.

A sliver of light shines into her eye when her eyelids crack open.

_A boy with dark hair and blue eyes..._

She stares, shocked. It can't be, can't be him, why would he save her after...?

His small warm hands press against the side of her neck where the pulse is steadying, the exact warmth and size she remembered.

Her heart hammers and blood from the bullet leaks down her head and into her eyes, and she's blinded in red and the accusing smell of rust.

_Kotah._

Lucy thinks, _I can't face him after-_

_Blood._

_Blood and Kotah, the two things that always determine her life, her worth._

The bullet pierces her tortured mind in two and Lucy sleeps.

* * *

_She's been shot, _Conan Edogawa thinks, his sharp eyes noting the blood winding down her face in long drips and his hands pushing back thick and unusually colored hair to see the neat hole drilled into her scalp. He identifies by shape and depth as it from a snipe. Aimed better, and it would have killed her in an instant. Either she'd moved or the sniper's aim'd slipped though, and this strange wounded girl survived. Barely. He thanks the CPR he'd learned when Yusaku Kudo had revived a trauma victim's stopped heart on their cruise to America(witness to a brutal murder.)

The girl is unconscious but alive. He can see her breathing even out and her tightly tensed face soften and smooth. She is easily the oddest person Conan had ever seen and he'd grown up with an actress for a mother. Her skin is the palest he's ever seen. Her muscles are lithe and strong on her slim body. The pain he'd first seen on her face made her appear old but now Conan can easily credit her from somewhere to her late teens to early twenties, and he estimates teens; what adult would dye such long hair that bright shade of rose pink? His 'teen' theory was strengthened by the horned hairclip tucked on her head.

Conan looks down at the girl, questions yet to be answered whirling behind his fake glasses. The tint of her skin suggested it hadn't been under sunlight for years yet the firm muscles rippling under it, catlike in reflex, dented this idea as if she worked out daily. The pads of her fingers and palms were innocent of hard callouses. And to have almost drowned in the ocean with a bullet through her head...? Had her supposed killer tossed her to sea when they thought she'd died? And why kill a young girl at all?

"Conan-kun!!"

Ran sprinted towards them, her hair long brown ribbons and her wide eyes concerned. They snapped to the girl unconscious that Conan was kneeling over and she immediately dropped to her knees beside the girl. "Such a young girl..." Ran whispered. Her pale hands repeated Conan's actions; take pulse, examine wound. "Sonoko! Call an ambulance!!" shouted Ran to the blonde flagging after them with a group of kids tagging along.

Sonoko looked confused."Wh-" It was then she spotted the bleeding, limp girl and went white. "R-Right!" Sonoko pulled the latest cell phone from seemingly no where, punching in numbers. Ai Haibara having retrieved the "older" girls, now helped Ran in wrestling Genta's shirt off and draping it over the girl's nudity.

Conan reached to touch the horned "headband" as the ambulance wails pealed around them.

* * *

"Haibara."

The auburn haired genius looked at the deadly serious Conan. Ran and Sonoko were comforting the crying Detective Boys and red ambulance lights washed the sands over on the boardwalk.

Conan's eyes bore into hers, slightly darker than her own lighter blues but both the depth of eyes too old for such young, small bodies.

"I'll explain later-,"

Medics were drumming down the wooden stairs with a stretcher between two of them. Conan looked urgent.

_"Don't let them near her horns."_

As they were packing her into the ambulance, Ai and Conan both volunteered to ride with her. When the medics were hesitant to bring such innocent children with them for blood and possible death, Ai started talking quietly to them, calm and low.

On the ride there Conan whispered to her and her light blue eyes grew steadily sharper and harder.

The drivers talking later, said it was cute that those little kids were so concerned over a stranger.

* * *

They sat on collapsable chairs pulled close to her narrow hospital bed. Two small children, one a boy with dark brown hair and deep blue eyes, the other a quiet girl who scared the orderlies who came in to check they weren't playing around. They were leaning over the patient and talking again and the orderlies thought again how strange they were, to never be laughing or never out of their seats unless the older brown haired girl and other kids were there. Conan had just convinced Ran to go buy some tea for them so he could talk seriously to Haibara.

The patient had gauze bandaged tight and cleanly around her head and her long, flame pink hair fanned over her soft pillow and down her shoulders. Her face was peaceful. Tubes taped to the insides of her wrists indicated a good heartbeat on its machine.

"What are you saying you think she is?" Conan asked, eyeing the loose scrubs cap they'd grabbed in the ambulance car and yanked over her horns. The bullet shot through her head had lodged in her splintered skull and, through surgery, had been drawn out, stitched over and bandaged. Ai said it probably wouldn't get infected.

She compressed her lips, unhooking the clipboard attached to the end of the cot and flipping through sheets of mostly blank information. Ai sighed and muttered to herself, low enough so Conan couldn't hear her.

"What?"

"A _mutation_, Kudo-kun. A genetic abnormality in her scientific makeup," she clairified. Her eyes kept shifting to the girl laying pale and looking very frail under the wires and sheets. "It's the only possibility I can think of at the moment to explain those horns."

Conan felt a twitch in his eye. He knew what a mutation was. Childish body or not, he was still a high school junior with top marks in his advanced classes. But leave it to a scientist to specify like that in such a patronizing tone... He weighed the benefits of saying he already knew about that but then Ai would just smirk and trap him with his own words. He decided it wasn't worth it.

"I meant the gunshot, Haibara," he said instead. "Someone was shooting to kill, not warn or injure; why else aim for the head? She would've died instantly if something hadn't happened. But _why_ was she targeted?"

"She's attractive enough, perhaps a lover's quarrel?"

Conan shook his head. "I'm sure it's not that. It's too impersonal a way of killing. Whoever did this didn't want to be close enough to be seen."

"Assassination then. Humans naturally fear what they don't understand, and perhaps they were frightened of her mutation. In any case, that type of bullet belonged to a recent model of gun, both expensive and very rare. Even the Syndicate had only fifty," Ai offered. She didn't mention Gin owned one. There were some things she didn't need to remember.

The boy considered it. It seemed more likely, though he still itched to know why she had been so desperately needed to be killed.

"She hadn't left her house for a long time. The pallor of her skin should have some color at least, and the soles of her feet are too tender, unused to walking." _Was she a recluse? _"I don't think anyone would have seen her long enough to want to kill her."

* * *

Two hours after brain surgery, her fingers twitched on the bedsheet.

Conan and Ai were suprised as her pale eyelids peeled apart.

The color of her eyes were a clear dark red.

"Nyuu?"

* * *

**Author's Corner**

I was agonizing over this chapter. "Freaking Conan!" I was yelling. "Don't get her into the hospital! They'll take x rays, they'll want operations, they'll want her to have physical and psychological therapy!" But I couldn't see how else they'd react... do gooder Conan just had to have such strong faith in justice and right... he and Lucy are really gonna butt heads xD... Thankfully, while ranting right here I devised a method to sneak her outta the hospital legally(kinda o.o). You'll see it either next chapter or the one after that!(let's hope I don't forget ToT)

(scrolls over chapter and cries) This one sucks too!! TToTT I swear! One day... I will write a chapter that isn't choppy and short. One day... (starts singing, "Over the Rainbow")

Thanks to **Kaitou 1412**(cool name, yo :D) and **Immortal Sacrifice**(it seems to have a more complex ending than the anime from what I've heard) for reviewing! Toast! Toast for all! (scatters pieces of crisp toast to readers)(sorry, I get weird when I'm sick... and I have a cold...)

**Please r_eview_; update in _two_-_four_ days.**


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